thinking aloud..

I'm planning to develop a usenet module right away. My specific needs are for a single newsgroup. Basically just offering my users a web interface to the newgroup to read/post. Not a big deal.

So I thought I'd come by here and think aloud..

I'm still pretty new to drupal, but had the following thought;

why do this as a module at all? I could just create a forum and populate its nodes/comments with a cron job from the newsgroup - it'd be a little more complicated; but basically:
have a table with all node / comment id's that were fetched from the newsgroup.
scan newsgroup hourly (or whatever) for new posts
cron job would also scan nodes in that forum that were posted via my site and post them to the newsgroup

good idea or bad idea? The alternative is a module which would bascially be independant of the drupal strucutre - but why reinvent the wheel?

Here's the one issue that comes to mind;
clearly I cannot expect everyone who posts to the newsgroup to also have an account on my site. So the posts / comments would have to be anonymous. I could append the posters name to the body itself. I'd prefer a solution of being able to have the authors name be the authors name even if there is no corelation to an existing user account.

am I making sense here? Basically allowing anonymous posts to have a given name (although I'm not to keen on permitting my users to do this site-wide).. I haven't dug in to see how difficult this would be, anyone done anything similar?

So, I'm just thinking aloud.. anyone else got any ideas for doing this? I could do it completley independant of drupal, then basically hack t into drupal as a module.. but I'd like to take a logical approach and really take advantage of what drupal has to offer. Populating a forum makes sense to me (with the one catch of anonymous authors with names).

throw your thoughts back at me you drupal-holics.